Having established we think differently about 🐓 compared to 🐕 or 🐅, a Q I explored during my PhD was whether we considered the welfare of one type of animal to vary across different contexts. How would you rate the welfare of a Guide dog? Pet dog? Police dog? Greyhound? Stray?
Even if you don’t ‘know’ a lot about each of these contexts, I bet you have a gut response to how you rate the quality of life for each of these places we find dogs. Consider both physical health and mental wellbeing. I have to duck into weekly RUOK meeting with @AWSciCent now 👋🏼
Over 2000 people told me how they would rate the welfare of dogs across different contexts and there was a lot of variation. This was the first time this had been demonstrated across one type of animal. Do the results match with how you would assess? #animalwelfare#dogs#science
One of the unexpected findings in this study was that the vast majority of people surveyed believed their own dog enjoyed the highest level of welfare compared to all other contexts. This better-than-average-effect seen in other areas of self-assessment e.g. driving & parenting
The other thing interesting thing was that dogs which arguably have the most behavioural, environmental, social and sexual freedom (wild dogs) were perceived to have far lower welfare than dogs living highly controlled lives in the service of humans (e.g. guide or police dogs) 🤔
I’m now supervising 5 graduate research (social and applied psychology) projects at @MonashUni to explore these ideas further in terms of the psychology underlying those attitudes and beliefs regarding dogs and also horses. Projects due to finish in Oct - excited to see results!
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2/Our findings suggest that student evaluations of teaching seem to measure *conformity with gendered expectations* rather than teaching quality
A cause for concern given the integration of SET data into performance profiles, and management and organisation of teaching practice
3/Before I go on, in terms of the necessarily binary reporting, it is very important to say here that we recognise the ‘pluralities inherent in gender(s)’ that complicate simple binary approaches to gender (Weerawardhana, 2018, p.189), and we do discuss this in the paper
On important background, in March 2020 the IOC recognised harassment and abuse as a current human rights challenge, and in particular recognised that LGBTQI+ athletes are at “particular risk of harm and structural discrimination”
3/n
The IOC now recognise female eligibility regulation *as an organisational violence issue* and as systemic discrimination
[I'll do another tweet thread on this later, drawing on my own research on this]
I want to address a narrative that we see around women’s sport and inclusion (particularly from those who seek to exclude trans women & women with sex variations from women’s sport), and how this narrative is part of a bigger pattern that functions to keep women small
2/n
I have been hearing more frequently the narrative that women's sport apparently exists as a 'protected category' so that women can win (because, on this account, without it no woman will ever win again)
3/n
This is:
a) *not* the reason why women's sport exists as a category,
and b) it is *not* true that no woman will ever win again.
This narrative is profoundly paternalistic and keeps women small.